Sunday paper tidbits

Rainy day here in NJ, so kids are playing the Wii and Jim and I are surfing away. But it meant that I had no guilt in lingering over my Sunday paper with my cup of coffee.

- Work begins next month on the nation's biggest mass transit construction project in recent history. New York and New Jersey are building the first rail tunnels under the Hudson River in a century. It will employ thousands of people with many working deep underground in round-the-clock shifts (those of you who know my phobias know that makes me shudder). They will use tunnel-boring machines that are longer than a football field. So by the time 2017 rolls around it should ease the commute from NJ to NY which experts are projecting will have ridership that is 60% higher than it is today.

- 38 school districts in NJ are now offering Chinese as a foreign language. Very smart considering the article says 1/5 of the world's population speaks the language and it is the most used language on the internet. Interesting how different languages come in and out of vogue. Twenty years ago Japanese was the "hot" language up here; some schools still teach it while others have since dropped it. And schools in Summit, NJ, no longer offer German (Valda Carroll must be spinning in her grave). If Chinese is still offered when Grace gets older I'm sure she'll want to give a try, but I bet it is a really hard language to learn.

- Salamo Arouch has passed away. I wasn't aware who he was, but apparently he boxed for his life in Auschwitz. He was a Sephardic Jew from Salonika, Greece, who was sent to Auschwitz in 1943. During his nearly two years there he estimated he defeated 208 opponents with two draws. Pretty much had to fight for his life - the man who lost the bout was severely weakened, "...and the Nazis shot the weak." A movie was made about his life in 1989 starring Willem Defoe titled "Triumph of the Spirit." After Greece was overrun by Germany in 1941, 47,000 residents of Salonika were sent to prison camps. Only 2,000 survived the war.